These United States ─ A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present

It’s a breathtaking story of war and depression, astute leadership and arrogant power, inspiring mass movements, and the rise and decline of a middle-class democracy. It’s also the moving story of a proud new American citizen cut off from his family in Lithuania by immigration restrictions; of a young woman from Kansas, stationed at Pearl Harbor, facing the unimagined challenges of her generation’s “rendezvous with destiny”; of a steelworker able to achieve economic security in the postwar surge only to see his son fall back in a society of growing inequality.Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue, acclaimed historians of American politics and society, forge the panoramic and the personal into an absorbing, authoritative narrative of twentieth-century America. The story begins and ends in periods of concentrated wealth, with immigration roiling politics and racial divisions flaring. Its arc over the century makes the illuminating, insightful connections characteristic of the best historical writing.